March 29, 2014

You young punks…

I was over at my mothers’ place today, she is in her 90’s, a few years ago I got and installed for her a freesat system and a flat screen telly, so today I flick through the HD channels on freesat and bang the thing on RT, Russki computerivsputnikteevee, fucking breath of fresh air, took me straight back to Gulf War 1 and my mate with the 4 metre tracking dish, you’d watch CNN for a bit, then switch to Fox and think they were talking about a completely different war, then switch to the Beeb and think they were talking about a completely different war, then switch to RTE and think they were talking about a completely different war.

Course, RT has a very different take on israel / palestine / syria / turkey / crimea etc etc than all the western channels, in much the same way that the many pirate DJ’s at Radio Caroline had a different take on contemporary music and radio than the Beeb etc.

Oh to be a youth listening to the great 208 on long wave at night, I remember it well, but all those pioneers, and myself, and myself watching Gulf War 1, and myself watching RT today on my mum’s Freesat HD system all had one thing in common.

It is a seemingly trivial thing, but it is a hugely, hugely, hugely important thing.

It is flatly impossible to remotely detect if you are watching or listening to it.

Over the internet, it is so trivial that it is routine to track what every single household does, if I set up “Radio Free Airstrip 1” and stream it over the web, 100% of all listeners can be identified within 60 seconds.

Multicast != Broadcast.

I see lots of people talking, shades of won’t get fooled again, because now you know, what with teh intertubez and all, we are all so informed, and bloggers like me have a voice that is equal to Reuters…. yeah… right…

Bitchez, you are not fucking free when the state can routinely track what sites y’all been visiting, which they can do, quite independently of any cookies or websites or server settings or anything else….

It only struck me today, talking to one of my young nephews in his twenties, that he didn’t even know what the fuck I was on about, having never even lived in a world in which his every move, communication, social interaction and financial transaction was open to the State.

I tried to explain, you could listen to 208, or Lord Haw Haw, or Liberation radio, and unless you were being physically watched or overheard from a few feet away, nobody would know, and if you heard someone coming, spin the dial, all the evidence just vanished…